From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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11 Don't allow less than seven characters on a line

11 Don't allow less than seven characters on a line

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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11 Don't allow less than seven characters on a line

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Law 11: Don't allow less than seven characters on the line. When you're formatting paragraphs of text, sometimes a single word, or maybe a short phrase, is going to end up as the last line of a paragraph. It's pretty much inevitable. Notice how this dangling word is causing visual unbalance in our paragraph. Because our paragraph is not sitting on a visually stable base, it looks like it could even just tip right over. And besides being visually unappealing, having just one word on this last line is also wasteful. We've used an entire line for just our one little word. And that's just not a good use of white space. White space in your designs should be planned. This is unplanned, wasted white space. You may hear people talk about these short lines of text or you may read something about them, and sometimes they get referred to as 'widows,' sometimes they get referred to as 'orphans,' and if you start poking around, you'll see that there are a lot of different conflicting definitions…

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